Sony (NYSE: SNE) is making video cameras smarter. The IMX500 line of intelligent video sensors will come with embedded access to artificial intelligence (AI) tools from Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) Azure. Camera systems built around these sensor chips will be able to analyze their video streams in real time. What's the big idea? The IMX500 sensor is not made for smartphones, but for enterprise-class security cameras and monitors in industrial equipment systems. Paired with a custom data management, Sony's chipset can analyze the video stream locally. This setup can tackle many video analysis tasks that currently are done by a central server in the cloud, allowing the security system or industrial instrumentation to take action without contacting a server first. The app-and-sensor pairing needs to be trained with the help of the full Azure cloud-computing system, passing key video analysis signals down from the cloud-based machine learning process to Sony's sensor management app. Image source: Getty Images. For example, a customer can train the IMX500 system to tell the difference between a good weld and a bad one by feeding it a certain number of example videos. A simplified form of the Azure-powered data analysis can then run in the end user's industrial environment, ready to sound the alarm when a bad weld shows up on the production line. It's a classic Internet of Things process, but the data analysis is done without sending the video outside this camera system's local environment. Sony and Microsoft claim that the IMX500 system will simplify workflows and save both time and data traffic by keeping things local. Camera system builders will "spend less time on routine, low-value integration and provisioning work and more time on creating unique solutions to meet customers' demands." 10 stocks we like better than MicrosoftWhen investing geniuses David and Tom Gardner have a stock tip, it can pay to listen. After all, the newsletter they have run for over a decade, Motley Fool Stock Advisor, has tripled the market.* David and Tom just revealed what they believe are the ten best stocks for investors to buy right now... and Microsoft wasn't one of them! That's right -- they think these 10 stocks are even better buys. See the 10 stocks *Stock Advisor returns as of April 16, 2020 Teresa Kersten, an employee of LinkedIn, a Microsoft subsidiary, is a member of The Motley Fool's board of directors. Anders Bylund has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool owns shares of and recommends Microsoft and recommends the following options: long January 2021 $85 calls on Microsoft and short January 2021 $115 calls on Microsoft. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.Source